Infor Announces Collaborative Social S&OP Model

United States – May 20, 2013, 08:09 AM

Infor, a leading provider of business application software serving more than 70,000 customers, today announced a Social Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) model to bolster collaboration and establish dynamic supply chain management. Infor's Social S&OP model is an innovative approach to sync compartmentalized facets of communication across the S&OP process on a real-time basis. Infor Ming.leTM, a comprehensive platform for social collaboration, business process improvement and contextual analytics, powers Infor's Social S&OP model. Subscribing to this method allows organizations to transcend traditional boundaries, empowering S&OP stakeholders to make better, faster decisions through access to real-time data, events and exception management generated alerts. Social S&OP unites the communication across the various key elements of the S&OP process such as sales forecasts, financial objectives, distribution schedules, product lifecycle assessments and inventory levels.

The rapid adoption of social networking amongst consumers is driving the need for a similar response within the enterprise. Collaboration in S&OP is about harnessing the collective intelligence of stakeholders to make a decision. Creating a social atmosphere for S&OP enables a more optimized strategic and tactical supply chain planning process including internal and external stakeholders enabling faster response to changing market conditions and customer requirements, as well as better decision making to help improve customer service levels and increase profit margins.

Infor's Social S&OP offering is a natural candidate for adoption of social networking techniques; it further utilizes common social functionality to provide greater collaboration in areas where traditional methods such as email are becoming ineffective. Much like consumer-based social platforms, users are able to receive a newsfeed that is relevant to their business needs. Instead of following an individual or company, users can follow, share and comment on a sales order, promotion, client, brand, production job or event. The visibility established by following these workflows allows employees to use the most accurate information and remain dynamic in their decision-making.

Key Features

Infor Social S&OP embeds a powerful exception management engine that utilizes alerts and workflow types to ensure each team member stays up-to-date on the project status and can take immediate action if required.

Users can benefit from a Social S&OP model across various stations within the supply chain. A depot manager is able to receive a stock alert for product inventory levels. From there the manager can note the product availability within the real-time workflow, ensuring end-to-end management and closing the loop from order-to-delivery.

As accountability is a major concern for the adoption of social business tools, social interactions are tracked by the S&OP tool. This helps prevent the pitfalls associated with unstructured and external communications, which tend to lack auditability. The application helps ensure that communications remain in context and that discussions stay paired to specific developments.

Social interactions go beyond problems and alerts, they can simply inform contributors about what is happening. Traditional S&OP tracks only problems. Social S&OP can also inform of relevant day-to-day news feeds. Social postings can occur between people, applications, and things such as web services and newsfeeds.

Infor Quote

"Planning for profit and making decisions are major concerns that impact the supply chain and doing so effectively requires faster reactions that based on real-time, accurate information from internal and external stakeholders. Infor has transformed S&OP by embedding Infor Ming.leTM social collaboration so that issues are immediately visible to the whole management team, empowering them to develop resolutions interactively in real-time. Infor Ming.leTM provides a history of how consensus was reached, complete with links into Infor Enterprise Applications to support the decision making process with live data," said John Bermudez, vice president, Product Management, Infor. "A best-practice S&OP process has always required great collaboration. With Infor Social S&OP, collaboration is built-in to deliver real value, quickly and effectively."

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Infor is fundamentally changing the way information is published and consumed in the enterprise, helping 70,000 customers in 194 countries improve operations, drive growth, and quickly adapt to changes in business demands. Infor offers deep industry-specific applications and suites, engineered for speed, and with an innovative user experience design that is simple, transparent, and elegant. Infor provides flexible deployment options that give customers a choice to run their businesses in the cloud, on-premises, or both. To learn more about Infor, please visit www.infor.com.

Infor customers include:

19 of the top 20 aerospace companies

12 of the top 13 high tech companies

10 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies

23 of the top 50 largest US hospitals

43 of the top 50 industrial distributors

26 of the top 35 global retailers

5 of the top 9 brewers

This announcement reflects the direction Infor may take with regard to the specific product(s) described herein, all of which is subject to change by Infor in its sole discretion, with or without notice to you. This announcement is not a commitment to you in any way and you should not rely on this document or any of its content in making any decision. Infor is not committing to develop or deliver any specified enhancement, upgrade, product or functionality, even if such is described in this announcement and even if such description is accompanied by words such as "anticipate," "believe," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should," "will," and/or similar expressions. Many factors can affect Infor's product development plans and the nature, content and timing of future product releases, all of which remain in the sole discretion of Infor. This announcement, in whole or in part, may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Infor or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Infor expressly disclaims any liability with respect to this announcement.

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